Since When Did 'Safe Spaces' Become Ok?

We all have periods in life where we wish we could get away from everything; sometimes that “thing” is a demanding boss at your job, or maybe it’s a boyfriend or girlfriend who won’t fuck off about how you spend all your free time looking at dank memes on the Internet.

“Sorry, the ice cream machine doesn’t operate on days that end in Y.”

It doesn’t matter what “it” is, the point is that you want to dip, but can’t. You’re stuck without a vacation fund or a good set of earplugs, and life is now all the worse for it.

Enter: safe spaces.

— just kidding! I know I know, “Safe spaces are for those college pussies who can’t handle life!” And while yes, I technically agree, that’s not what they were originally meant for. Back in the mid 1960’s, the term “safe space” was coined by the gay and lesbian community who, if you never bothered to pay attention in American History, were pretty used to getting butt fucked by the government. Not only were gays getting legally kicked out of the military for no reason other than the fact that they were gay, but in New York City, one of the most liberal cities in the country, homosexuals were not even allowed to be served alcohol in licensed bars under threat of having that bar’s liquor license revoked.

And so were born the original “safe spaces,” meant to be somewhere you could go and be surrounded by likeminded people until the police arrived to blast you with water cannons. At no point in time did anyone in these “safe spaces” say “Hey, you know what would be great? If we used these meetings as an excuse to plug our ears to any ideas we find offensive. That’ll REALLY show ’em!” 

Yet that’s the point we’ve arrived at — instead of being a place where people who’ve been through similar experiences can find solace in each other, we now have a bunch of whiny college kids complaining about being “triggered.”

You know who gets triggered? War veterans. Survivors of sexual assault. Aka, people who have actually lived through some rough shit, and not that  campus “fat-tivist” who keeps blowing up the university Facebook wall about how the scales in the dorm bathrooms are “fat shaming” by having a sticker that says “Maximum weight: 400 lbs.,” or the kids at Oberlin College who started protesting their dining hall for “culturally appropriating” sushi.

All complete fucking lies 🙂

And the irony here that none of these Social Justice Warriors realize, is that they’re completely ruining the concept of a “safe space” for the people who actually need them. You probably turned this video on and expected me to go on a hot streak of shitting on morons left and right, claiming that all safe spaces are really just excuses for millennials to be coddled after they’ve left home.

Instead, I think there is a middle ground. I think that the alcoholic who needs somewhere to talk about his struggles with addiction should have a place to do so without being judged. I think the war veteran who needs to sleep with earplugs in on the Fourth of July for fear of being triggered should be able to have somewhere to talk about his time being deployed without interruption, and I think that anyone who has been the victim of a hate crime should be able to link and find solace in other with the same experiences.

Finding out that the California roll served on your landlocked Midwestern college campus is not genuine Japanese sushi, or that your white neighbors went as Speedy Gonzales for Halloween when you actually visited Mexico last year, wrote some shitty poetry on a hillside while drinking an “authentic” margarita and eating fish tacos topped with salsa VERDE and not OLD EL PASO thank you very much, then made out with a dude named “Juan” later that night who you assume TOTALLYYYYYY would’ve taken offense to your friends’ costumes, are not examples of when a “safe space” is necessary.

Those are examples of when you should start taking a good whiff of the air around you, because it looks to me like you’ve inserted your head all the way up your ass without even noticing the shit dripping down your throat.

Now, with that being said…

Guys, we GOTTA stop acting like social justice warriors are the plague that’s ruining society. At best, they are a minority within the population who spend their days eating low-fat yogurt and self-flagellating over the time they used a fork instead of chopsticks at PF Changs. At worst, they are a minority within the population who spend their days eating low-fat yogurt and self-flagellating over the time they used a fork instead of chopsticks at PF Changs.

In other words, none of these “special snowflakes” were built to actually function in the real world, so once mom finally blocks Tumblr on their laptop and forces them to take a walk outside, or when all these women’s studies majors graduate and realize that spending four years writing about how “women” should be spelled with a “Y” does not good workplace conversation make, they’ll chill the fuck out.

Sometimes things get blown out of proportion and people get wrapped up in getting worked up for the sake of having something to be angry about, and when that happens I take a stroll down the block and realize that most people aren’t Social Justice Warriors. Most people aren’t afraid of saying “Merry Christmas” and I haven’t met a single person who thinks Taco Bell is a cultural abomination so much as a gastrointestinal one.

But hey, what do I know? I thought the Asian stir fry section of our dining hall at college was pretty alright, and as far as I’m concerned Juan was a 4 out of 10 at best, so how much are we really going to value his opinion? Chivalry is dead unless you’re an eight or above, and if you don’t like it, go ahead and make yourself a safe space about it.